Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

“I’ve personally never found the Cloisters persuasive in the least,” said Oona. “I don’t care how old it’s supposed to be.”

I now had another wave of my straddling-universes feeling. Perkus and Noteless could meet each other, yet they were forever apart, impenetrable essences. Only I had the freedom to dabble in each of their realities and feel the native absurdity of their simultaneous distance and proximity. Who needed computers to simulate worlds? Every person was their own simulator. But give him credit, Noteless didn’t flinch at Oona’s witticisms, or Perkus’s non sequiturs. His eyes only flared as if he thought the Cloisters might make a nice locale for a monumental pit. And then tilted forward to issue a non sequitur of his own: “Potemkin villages.”

Oona and I were silent, demurring to the gnomic imperious, while Perkus blurted, “Yes, that’s it, Potemkin villages, exactly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Oona.

“Potemkin villages, you know-huts and bonfires and flocks of sheep, false fronts, stage sets, like they used to fool Catherine the Great,” said Perkus impatiently, before returning to his main thread. “So, I was thinking it might even be cheaper on the computing power, because a simulation of the Cloisters or this room or whatever has to obey certain dictates of time and space, all our different impressions have to be brought into alignment, whereas from what I’ve gathered about a virtual space like Yet Another World, it’s sort of rubbery and expansible, full of jump cuts and glitches. So, maybe that would be easier, since no one’s expecting smooth continuity.”

“It is only our wishful senses that give continuity to chaos,” said Noteless ominously.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Because I was just about to say the exact same thing.” Standing in Noteless’s shade had brought out a twitchy, hectoring humor in me. I’m taller than most men, and when I look up at one, it makes me feel like Bugs Bunny. Or perhaps I was sick of watching Noteless burn holes in Perkus with his eyes, wanted the great man to know I was his proper rival, the one to hate. “You really ought to give virtual reality a chance, Mr. Noteless.”

“Ought I?”

Oona’s glance said I’d better squelch this impulse, but I had one more jape in me, at least. “A place like Yet Another World might be a terrific opportunity for one of your installations. Without applying for a permit you could insert the Grand Canyon between Seventy-second and Seventy-third Streets, and no one would be in any way inconvenienced.”

“I don’t work in pixels,” intoned Noteless, with the self-regard of a Stella Adler student declaring he refused to consider commercials. “I work in stone and soil.”

“Like a rock critic,” I suggested. Now all three stared, and I shut up. I’d at least gained my share of Noteless’s scorn. Before I could screw myself deeper into this hole-call it One-Man Fjord -a member of the catering staff intruded to announce that dinner was served, and we should feel free to move into the dining room, and to take any seat we liked. Aroused from my fixation, I saw the guests had been trickling away for a while now.

“Let’s go,” said Perkus, instantaneously frantic. His radar had gone off: he meant to sit near enough to interrogate Russ Grinspoon, and I felt I should sit near enough to monitor Perkus.

“Your date needs you,” said Oona, with the relish of a savored line. Noteless ignored us, returned to his mental aerie. I gave her one look I hoped could say I contained as large a love as she’d ever require, but that obviously no love could encompass Laird Noteless, then let myself be swept off in the direction the party was flowing, helpless Alice to Perkus’s Red Queen.

Yet Another World wasn’t the only reality that was expansible. Money had its solvent powers, could dissolve the rear walls of a nineteenth-century town house to throw a dining room into what must have been the backyard, under a glass atrium that now worked as a blizzardy planetarium. Admittedly, the effect was thrilling, and the guests fell into a nice hush as they sorted out into seats around the six circular, candelabra-lit tables. Perkus, true to my guess, made a beeline for a far table where I now spotted Russ Grinspoon, albeit a demurely suited, balding, and goateed rendition of the singer I remembered. He still had the languor of a congenital sidekick (it takes one to know one), and I could restore his frizzy reddish halo of hair and Nehru jacket in mind’s eye easily enough. Perkus grabbed us two places beside him, and then seated himself in the middle. I followed, distantly aware of Oona and Noteless taking places in the room’s opposite corner.

Grinspoon played our table’s host, I suppose in his role as the mayor’s man, shaking hands, kissing the ladies, remaining standing until the chairs were full. I couldn’t tell whether this was something planned or not, but at the table to our left Richard Abneg took a similar role, while at the mayor’s table the small steely blonde still acted as Arnheim’s usher and protector. Only after this ritual settling did Grinspoon turn to Perkus Tooth, a curious expression on his face, and under cover of the jocular roar and babble that now rose to the snow-mad skylights to drown out any soft-spoken comment, said wryly, “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, you know each other?” I said.

Grinspoon wrinkled an eyebrow, and let a beat pass. “No.” I understood he meant he’d simply heard his freak alarm go off-purple velvet over crimson didn’t make it too hard-and that it amused him to find someone like Perkus here, where Grinspoon himself was accustomed to defining the perimeter of the outré. He offered his hand to Perkus, then me, and it was droopy and soft as an empty glove. “I haven’t had that pleasure.” We said our names, and Grinspoon looked at me a moment longer, and said, “Right.” But it was Perkus who interested him. “You want to get high?” Grinspoon said, not whispering, relying that others were engaged elsewhere, showing the assurance of a veteran of a hundred such evenings.

“Sure!” said Perkus.

“Okay, but down, boy. We’re going to have to wait until after the appetizers.” With that, Grinspoon turned decisively from us, to the guests at his right, leaving me with Perkus, who seemed totally gratified but also mastered, as if in some preemptory maneuver, by Grinspoon’s offer. All his verbal imperatives stifled for the moment, the stuff I imagined he’d been saving to tell or ask a man who, however unimportant an artist himself, had been directed by two men who’d also directed Brando . Perkus was a little beside himself, in the glittering room, recognizable faces everywhere, and the throne of power, too. When he found his tongue again he began yammering disjointedly in my ear, charting associations the party’s inhabitants and scenery held for him, and I trusted myself to appear to be listening even as I phased him out for my own relief. I felt bad, almost, for overstimulating Perkus. I’d ushered a kind of Rip Van Winkle from the gentle bed of his fantasies to this harsh tableau of real fame and influence, and jarring a sleepwalker incurs responsibility.

It was all I could do, though, to keep from craning my neck at Oona’s far table. As Russ Grinspoon had implied, this getting-to-know-you interlude, while only wine had been poured but no plates set down, would be an impolite moment to break from our table. Later, in the rhythm of such things, we could browse between the tables. I had a good excuse for going over to Oona’s. Sandra Saunders Eppling was seated there, and it was in the nature of male-to-female etiquette, as well as the duties of a sitcom son to a sitcom mom, that I should approach Sandra for the reunion scene I could safely guess many bystanders quietly anticipated. Oona and Noteless were chatting with Sandra now.